Character set on display has changed to symbols

[jack63ss]

I booted my Win 7 system this morning and all the characters on the login screen looked like symbols. I was able to log in and all my icons are on the desktop, but all the labels are symbols not characters. Some of the apps, like Firefox, Chrome, Word and the Command Prompt open and display the correct text, but some, like Notepad and Internet Explorer, show just symbols. And some actually show the menu and toolbar as symbols, but the body text as characters.


I did install two new apps yesterday, so I would not be surprised if a setting got changed someplace, but I have no idea where or how. I started a command window and ran intl.cpl, and it still showed English as the language. I also checked the installed Fonts and the Fonts page only shows 4 fonts, but if you go to c:\windows\fonts ALL the fonts are there.



The fact I can't read what is on the screen makes troubleshooting and fixing this hard. If anyone has any suggestions on how to repair this I would definitely appreciate it, as that system is unusable right now.




UPDATE: So the issue seems to be that I lost 'access' to most of my fonts. I was able to get to the Window Color and Appearance dialog and change the Icon setting to Fixedsys, which gave me readable characters for my desktop icons again. So i was able to get to Fonts, and the only 4 fonts shown are Fixedsys, System, Terminal and 8514oem. Unfortunately all the characters in the control section of the dialog are still symbols. And what is odd is that most of the Item entries in Windows Color and Appearance, like Desktop, have a blank Font field and I can't change them.



If there is a way to fix with regedit PLEASE let me know, as that at least kind of works.


Thanks










Thanks
Jack

 

[wither 2]

I suggest running a system restore to before this happened, if you have a restore point.

What software did you install?

 

[file3456]

Try clearing the font cache. Ways to Clear Font Cache on Windows

What two programs did you install?

 

[jack63ss]

Not Yet

I basically followed the instructions on that page (stop font service, remove files, reboot), and the 3 fontcache files and fntcache.dat got rebuilt, but I still have the problem. I really thought that was going to solve the problem, but guess not.



So let me ask, one thing I do not understand is that if I run the Fonts command, when it shows the list of Fonts there are only four; 8514oem, fixedsys, system and terminal. However if I go into C:\Windows\Fonts there are 1070 files. It is like Windows lost track of the installed fonts. Is there a way to re-install them so they show up ?


Thanks


(And I said basically followed as it turns out that in Win 7 64bit there is no FontCache directory, the .dat files were in Local)

 

[jack63ss]

Got It, MAYBE

So I figured out how to reinstall existing fonts. We'll see if THAT helps.

 

[file3456]

Again, what was the name of those two programs? Sounds like some shenanigans went on.

The fonts should be in Windows and the cache is in local. So both are correct.

 

[jack63ss]

So I was able to get the system back to a usable state by manually re-installing a couple of fonts. Helped a little bit, then I renamed the segueUI.tff font to marlett.tff. Magically all the symbols disappeared and I got characters. Great. the Fonts command showed all the fonts I had reinstalled, but what I really wanted to find a way to get all of them back. At that point I rebooted the system, and .... lost everything back to symbols again. And Fonts showed only the original 4 font files again.



That was the 3rd time I had gotten things to an usable state and then did something simple that lost the new fonts, so I decided to give up trying to restore the fonts and get drastic. I decided to re-install Win7 and see if that would fix it. I did an Update so things didn't get totally wiped out and ... the system got absolutely and totally hosed. Can't read the screen and the system is stuck someplace. Ahhhhh ...


SO, I have decided to move the build of my new system forward. I am going to buy 2 new disks, and install Win 10 on one of them and just give up on Win 7. Yeah, I'll have to reinstall lots of stuff, but there was a lot of junk installed on the system anyway so I'll just suck it up. I'll be better off when I'm done.


Thanks for your help !
Jack

 

[wither 2]

I guess you didn't have a system restore point to restore the system, as I suggested in my first post. Seems it's too late at this point.

 

[jack63ss]

I did take a look, but the latest restore point I had was so old that I decided to just try to fix the font issue manually. Obviously disabling automatic restore point generation was a BIG mistake, and one that won't happen again. Thanks ...

 

[jack63ss]

Last Post

Okay, so I find this hard to believe, but after messing with this for a week and not being able to solve it, Windows finally "kind of" fixed it for me. The issue was that I would see symbols instead of characters (actually what I was seeing was the Marlett font with is mostly symbols). Fonts showed just 4 fonts, and after adding in more fonts I would be able to see characters, but eventually something like a reboot would cause me to lose the fonts again. I must have gone thru this 10 times and finally gave up.



So I got an extra disk, and installed Win 10. Fine. So at some point I rebooted, it started up my Win 7 instance and I got a message about having to run CHKDSK on the C: drive. Fine. However, when it finished and rebooted, PROBLEM SOLVED !!! Characters, not a symbol to be seen. And ALL my fonts showed up in Fonts.



I could go into a technical description of what I think the problem might have been, but this is not the place. My suggestion is simply that when in doubt, boot into Safe Mode, start the Windows Repair tool and run chkdisk. Does hurt and you never know !!!

 

[file3456]

You may have a dying disk. Check the SMART data first with Crystal Disk Info. and if necessary run Hard Drive Sentinel.

CrystalDiskInfo – Crystal Dew World (You don't need the Japanese bull crap versions unless you're into Anime. LOL)

Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring

 

[jack63ss]

Odd in that the disk in question is an SSD which usually doesn't fail like that. I ran chkdsk in Safe Mode and it did find some issues, which it fixed. I am going to run the SanDisk SSD checker and see what it says. BUT it is back, which was the important thing to me. Thanks

 

[file3456]

SSDs will fail like any hard drive. I've had several SSDs die on me. If you use CrystalDiskInfo., you might get a health percentage on the drive. I don't know how the program extrapolates this. It may be from SMART data on writes. Flash-based storage does have a finite wear level. How old is the drive?

Another interesting tool is SSD-Z. Download SSD-Z - MajorGeeks

 

[jack63ss]

The tools that came with my SSDs included health checking and surface analysis. The analysis includes a scan tool that will attempt to predict failures, I just need to run it occasionally. And I'll take a look at the tools you mentioned as well, so thanks for the info.